High Seas Trader

Friday, May 26, 2017

Platforms:

PC, Amiga

Publisher:

Impressions

Developer:

Impressions

Genres:

Strategy / Business Simulator

Release Date:

1995

Game Modes:

Singleplayer

In High Seas Trader you play as a hopeful apprentice in the home port of your choosing, a humble ship and small grubstake your only assets. With them, you’ll have to pay a crew and buy trade goods, then scan your records for the most profitable place to sell your cargo. If you do well — which, in High Seas Trader, means accumulating lots of money and gaining prestige as a merchant — you’ll earn fancy new titles and get to purchase your own princely estate.

There’s more to HST than just buying and selling, though. You’ll often find yourself attacked by pirates or representatives of rival nations, which means ship-to-ship combat and boarding melees. And then there’s the matter of “uncharted waters” — namely, the fact that your crew will mutiny if you sail into any area you’re not holding a map to. So you have to look for new and updated charts each time you reach port or meet a friendly sea captain.

There are also a number of random factors, such as war, plagues, and so on, that will affect prices at the various ports and even whether or not you’ll be allowed to enter them. And although the game starts out along a fairly historical track, these random factors gives the game decent replay value.